Le Corbusier’s 1939 plan for an infinitely expandable museum went down the toilet. Malevich and Mondrian’s conceptual idealism threw us off the track. Judd and Morris’s antagonism to marks of personal handicraft is like God’s.

Mondrian’s tough irreducible nut of radiant energy indicates drug abuse. Stella’s enclosed field of multiple unfocused activities shows that he is a secret jackoff artist. Kenneth Noland’s chevron paintings of 1963-64 were commissioned by an insect.

Jasper Johns’s “0-9” lithographs of 1963 tell us to make love not war. Miriam Schapiro, Larry Zox, Ron Davis and Darby Bannard’s investigation of fictive depth on a plane surface would be possible only under capitalism. Pollock and Kline’s participation in a field of forces is old hat.

Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland’s searing antibodies of color make whoopee. Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s rainbow disks smack of homework. Newman’s thin bands on open fields of color decorate Uranus.

Roy Lichtenstein’s parodies of the aggressively “moderne” fooled the police. Darby Bannard’s curious pastel blandness relates to a hatred of arithmetic. De Kooning’s impact is not to be spoken of here.

Funny how paintings bring back memories. The first time I saw a Rothko, a Pollock, a Mondrian, I was with my friend's mother, a painter, who was coping with manic depression. She used to go into mental institutions once a year, usually in spring, sometimes summer, where they gave her shock treatments. And when she came out, she would paint and paint and paint. She is still alive, still painting. But I remember her looking at a Rothko with tears in her eyes, saying yes, yes, I see. Rothko is right.

Thanks Leigh, and I'm joining you in that laugh, despite the hoary burden of the intervening years since this was writ. It appears to have had its share of cheek, that much can be said for it (and perhaps for its times, compared with the present general obeisance before the Money Gods at any rate).

The pomposity of art criticism remains perhaps only slightly more ridiculous than the ridiculous overvaluations it helps to enable. That Pollock pictured here was latterly bought (or perhaps sold, or reacquired...) by David Geffen for $62 m., or was it $162 m... but at that stratospheric level, do the numbers really matter?

Regarding number relevance at stratospheric levels, you're correct, of course. Still, like so many things, one's own views and those of others seem to collide. From time-to-time, I've attended mega-high-priced auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's in New York and the tension and sense of relevance to the crowd is so pronounced. It is definitely the weirdest, most unsettling spectator sports event I've ever seen. As for the pomposity in contemporary art criticism, I think I remember when things finally crossed from the confusing and barely relevant into the totally unreadable, but I've never been sure why publication owners allowed this to happen. I mean, it doesn't need to be this way.

Curtis, I think it's because the publication owners, the critics, the dealers, the auctioneers, and the blindly obeisant collectors with the money rings hooked through their noses, are all part of a self-perpetuating "support" industry that must shill to sell to live. Honesty, clarity and actual use-value simply do not enter this picture.